• Skalidris
    118
    I’m trying to understand exactly what this problem is about. From my understanding, the biggest mystery is that we currently don’t have nearly enough knowledge in neuroscience to explain why some neural networks lead to conscious experience and others don’t.
    But what if we did have that knowledge, would it solve the problem then?

    Imagine we found some sort of wave that certain neural networks create, that is related to consciousness: whenever we observe this specific wave, conscious experiences comes along as well. Would that solve the hard problem of consciousness or would it still leave philosophers wondering how exactly that wave represents the conscious experience?

    If the problem remains, then we have the same problem with a lot of other things like time, space,… However we try to rationalize it, no one can explain time and space, it’s just there in everything we know, there are building blocks of our world. The only way we can picture a world without time is if we imagine that time would stop. But that thought itself includes time. And it's the same with consciousness: consciousness is there whenever we think about it, any explanation would be self referencing.

    So my question is: is the root of the hard problem self reference or is it our critical lack of knowledge in that domain?
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